Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet - Electronic Frontier Foundation (reading rainbow books .txt) 📗

Contents:

Instructions for newcomers

Directional signpost

Founders’ statue

To see “Instructions for newcomers”, type

look Instructions for newcomers

and hit enter. You could do the same for “Directional signpost” and

“Founders’ statue.” Then type

SW

and enter to get to Tanstaafl Towers, the city housing complex, where

you have to claim an apartment (you may have to look around; many will

already) be occupied. And now it’s off to explore Holo! One command

you’ll want to keep in mind is “take.” Periodically, you’ll come

across items that, when you take them will confer certain abilities or

powers on you. If you type

help

and enter, you’ll get a list of files you can read to learn more about

the MUD’s commands.

The “say” command lets you talk to other players publicly. For

example,

say Hey, I’m here!

would be broadcast to everybody else in the room with you. If you

want to talk to just one particular person, use “whisper” instead of

“say.”

whisper agora=Hey, I’m here!

would be heard only by agora. Another way to communicate with

somebody regardless of where on the world they are is through your

pager. If you suddenly see yours go off while visiting, chances are

it’s a wizard checking to see if you need any help. To read his

message, type

page

To send him a message, type

page name=message

where name is the wizard’s name (it’ll be in the original message).

Other MUDs and MUCKs may have different commands, but generally

use the same basic idea of letting you navigate through relatively

simple English commands.

When you connect to a MUD, choose your password as carefully as

you would one for your host system; alas, there are MUD crackers who

enjoy trying to break into other people’s MUD accounts. And never,

never use the same password as the one you use on your host system!

MUDs can prove highly addicting. “The jury is still out on

whether MUDding is ‘just a game’ or ‘an extension of real life with

gamelike qualities’,” says Jennifer Smith, an active MUD player who

wrote an FAQ on the subject.

She adds one caution: “You shouldn’t do anything that you

wouldn’t do in real life, even if the world is a fantasy world. The

important thing to remember is that it’s the fantasy world of possibly

hundreds of people, and not just yours in particular. There’s a

human being on the other side of each and every wire! Always remember

that you may meet these other people some day, and they may break

your nose. People who treat others badly gradually build up bad

reputations and eventually receive the NO FUN Stamp of Disapproval.”

11.6 GO, GO, GO (AND CHESS, TOO)!

Fancy a good game of go or chess? You no longer have to head for

the nearest park with a board in hand. The Internet has a couple of

machines that let you engage people from around the world in your

favorite board games. Or, if you prefer, you can watch matches in

progress.

To play go,

telnet hellspark.wharton.upenn.edu 6969

log on as: guest

You’ll find prompts to various online help files to get you started.

For a chess match,

telnet news.panix.com 5000

log on as: guest

You’ll find prompts for online help files on the system, which lets you

choose your skill level.

11.7 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN

All is not fun and games on the Net. Like any community, the Net

has its share of obnoxious characters who seem to exist only to make

your life miserable (you’ve already met some of them in chapter 4).

There are people who seem to spend a bit more time on the Net than many

would find healthy. It also has its criminals. Clifford Stoll writes in

“The Cuckoo’s Egg” how he tracked a team of German hackers who were

breaking into U.S. computers and selling the information they found to

the Soviets. Robert Morris, a Cornell University student, was convicted

of unleashing a “worm” program that effectively disabled several thousand

computers connected to the Internet.

Of more immediate concern to the average Net user are crackers

who seek to find other’s passwords to break into Net systems and people

who infect programs on ftp sites with viruses.

There is a widely available program known as “Crack” that can

decipher user passwords composed of words that might be found in a

dictionary (this is why you shouldn’t use such passwords). Short of

that, there are the annoying types who take a special thrill in trying to

make you miserable. The best advice in dealing with them is to count to

10 and then ignore them — like juveniles everywhere, most of their fun

comes in seeing how upset you can get.

Meanwhile, two Cornell University students pleaded guilty in 1992 to

uploading virus-infected Macintosh programs to ftp sites. If you plan

to try out large amounts of software from ftp sites, it might be wise to

download or buy a good anti-viral program.

But can law enforcement go too far in seeking out the criminals?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in large part in

response to a series of government raids against an alleged gang of

hackers. The raids resulted in the near bankruptcy of one game

company never alleged to have had anything to do with the hackers,

when the government seized its computers and refused to give them

back. The case against another alleged participant collapsed in court

when his attorney showed the “proprietary” and supposedly hacked

information he printed in an electronic newsletter was actually

available via an 800 number for about $13 — from the phone company

from which that data was taken.

11.8 FYI

You can find discussions about IRC in the alt.irc newsgroup.

“A Discussion on Computer Network Conferencing,” by Darren Reed

(May, 1992), provides a theoretical background on why conferencing

systems such as IRC are a Good Thing. It’s available through ftp at

nic.ddn.mil in the rfc directory as rfc1324.txt.

Every Friday, Scott Goehring posts a new list of MUDs and related

games and their telnet addresses in the newsgroup rec.games.mud.announce.

There are several other mud newsgroups related to specific types of MUDs,

including rec.games.mud.social, rec.games.mud.adventure,

rec.games.mud.tiny, rec.games.mud.diku and rec.games.mud.lp.

For a good overview of the impact on the Internet of the Morris

Worm, read “Virus Highlights Need for Improved Internet Management,” by

the U.S. General Accounting Office (June, 1989). You can get a copy via

ftp from cert.sei.cmu.edu in the pub/virus-l/docs directory. It’s

listed as gao-rpt.

Clifford Stoll describes how the Internet works and how he tracked

a group of KGB-paid German hackers through it, in “The Cuckoo’s Egg:

Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage,” Doubleday

(1989).

Chapter 12: EDUCATION AND THE NET

12.1 THE NET IN THE CLASSROOM

If you’re a teacher, you’ve probably already begun to see the

potential the Net has for use in the class. Usenet, ftp and telnet have

tremendous educational potential, from keeping up with world events to

arranging international science experiments.

Because the Net now reaches so many countries and often stays

online even when the phones go down, you and your students can “tune

in” to first-hand accounts during international conflicts. Look at

your system’s list of Usenet soc.culture groups to see if there is one

about the country or region you’re interested in. Even in peacetime,

these newsgroups can be great places to find people from countries you

might be studying.

The biggest problem may be getting accounts for your students, if

you’re not lucky enough to live within the local calling area of a

Free-Net system. Many colleges and universities, however, are willing

to discuss providing accounts for secondary students at little or no

cost. Several states, including California and Texas, have Internet-

linked networks for teachers and students.

12.2 SOME SPECIFIC RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

In addition, there are a number of resources on the Internet aimed

specifically at elementary and secondary students and teachers. You

can use these to set up science experiments with classes in another

country, learn how to use computers in the classroom or keep up with the

latest advances in teaching everything from physics to physical

education.

Among them:

AskERIC Run by the Educational Resource and Information Center,

AskERIC provides a way for educators, librarians and

others interested in K-12 education to get more

information about virtually everything. The center

maintains an e-mail address (askeric@ericir.syr.edu) for

questions and promises answers within 48 hours. It also

maintains a gopher site that contains digests of

questions and answers, lesson plans in a variety of

fields and other educationally related information. The

gopher address is ericir.syr.edu.

Health-Ed: A mailing list for health educators. Send a request to

health-ed-request@stjhmc.fidonet.org

K12Net: Begun on the Fidonet hobbyist network, K12Net is now also

carried on many Usenet systems and provides a host of

interesting and valuable services. These include

international chat for students, foreign-language

discussions (for example, there are French and German-

only